Wednesday Words from the Studio – January 5, 2011

My second day in the studio this week was just as much fun as I had anticipated! It was nice to have the company of another artist for the day. Although I’ve been talking about and dreaming of new creations I turned my focus onto some smaller pieces that have been hanging around waiting for some attention. One piece has been through so many variations and changes that it will get it’s own blog post at a later date, and I’m STILL not sure it’s to the finished stage! But it’s getting there! I had a couple of small (8×8″) canvases that had their surfaces painted quite a while ago and nothing else was ever done to them. It was time to take them somewhere new! I covered each of them with a layer of white gesso, leaving some of the underneath surface & design peeking through. After that dried I used pencils/charcoal to draw some geometric designs on each canvas.

(untitled #1) image 1, work in progress (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker

(untitled #2) image 1, work in progress (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker

The next step was to choose my colors and start adding layers of acrylic into each of the spaces.

(untitled #1) image 2, work in progress (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker

I added a few more lines to the composition of the first piece and continued to paint. It took a few layers of paint to get the colors as intense as I wanted them. This is how they look now.

(untitled #1) image 3, work in progress (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker

(untitled #2) image 2, work in progress (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker

I am not certain that they are finished, I’m going to spend some time with them and see if they give me any clues about their direction. 🙂

The next project ended up being called the “Accidental Pizza” piece! I was having fun and didn’t take the amount of photos I normally do so you’ll have to imagine this triangle shaped canvas with lots of texture on it, painted with gray/greens, and some bits of black, white, blue & yellow. It almost reminded me of camouflage! It’s been around a while but was never a favorite piece so it had made it’s way back to the studio for some improvements. I added a new layer of acrylic gel and textured it with some swirling designs and also adhered three round pieces of cement on the surface. After that had all dried I took a thin, flexible palette knife and began scraping some red, yellow and eventually copper color paint across the surface.

"accidental pizza" image 1, work in progress (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker

I sprayed that with a mist of water to let in blend into the grooves. Meh. It was better than it had been but still needed something to make it “pop”. I remembered some iridescent gold ink that I had all but used up and thought that might just do the trick. Evidently I had used up more of the gold tone than I thought because what was left ended up looking more like an off-white, and not overly sparkly at that. Still it wasn’t looking too bad and I continued to drop more of it on the piece, watching it swirl & blend into the other colors. I was enjoying watching this process and it wasn’t until I was entirely finished adding all the ink that I backed away from the piece long enough to really get a good look at it. Holy COW! It looked just like a piece of pizza – melted cheese and all!

"accidental pizza" mixed media on canvas (c) 2011, Lynne Medsker

Now I do like pizza but I am pretty sure I hadn’t been thinking of it, we’d just finished a nice lunch and I’m positive I wasn’t hungry. After I let out a yell there was quite a bit of laughter about my creation and I’m sure I won’t live it down soon. One good note, I know a nice young couple that opened a pizza store last year so I think this may end up on the wall at their shop. At least it will have a happy home, isn’t that what all art wants?